Although the recording industries might believe they’re winning the fight, the Pirate Bay and others are continually one step ahead. In March, a Pirate Bay collaborator, who goes by the online name Mr. Spock, announced in a blog post that the team hoped to build drones that would float in the air and allow people to download movies and music through wireless radio transmitters.

“This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” Mr. Spock posted on the site. “A real act of war.” Some BitTorrent sites have also discussed storing servers in secure bank vaults. Message boards on the Web devoted to piracy have in the past raised the idea that the Pirate Bay has Web servers stored underwater.